[Kstars-devel] more naked-eye stuff

[mph]

Hi all,

Jason quickly replied to my queries about alternate constellations..
>
> Displaying alternate constellation lines should be easy to implement;
> you just have to follow the file format of clines.dat when making the
> new file.  I can help you understand the format if it isn't clear.  Then
> we just need to add code to let the user choose which set to use, which
> is trivial.
>
> Alternate star names will require a bit more coding, but not much.  In
> short, if you submit these data files to the list, we'll be happy to add
> these features to the program.
>
After looking a bit at the data formats and thinking a bit, I imagine the 
following user scenarios:

1) Alternate constellation names using the same (IAU) constellation lines 
(French, German, Chinese, etc.)  It would be easy to set up alternate 
cnames.dat files, but I'm not sure what to do about alternate fonts like 
arabic, devanagari, or chinese.  (Actually, I'm not even sure how to input 
some of these into KWrite, but I'm happy to learn.)

2) Alternate star names.  It seems like this should be in a separate file, 
instead of appending everything onto the hipXXX.dat files.  I'm not sure what 
key would be used to link the alt name with the appropriate star.  Perhaps 
the gname?  I would be happy to start working on making some files like this 
once there is an agreed format.  This also raises the issue of specifying 
different fonts for arabic, devanagari, or chinese etc..  

3) Alternate constellation shapes (clines.dat) paired with alternate 
constellation names.  We might need to reorganize the data somewhat to be 
able to pair clines.dat files with cnames.dat files. Presumably these would 
be paired according to a particular culture and potentially linked to 
culture-specific star names, though not necessarily.  This would take the 
most time to create (data), not only because of the number of points to be 
specified, but also because I have found it hard to find text sources that 
specify stars.  I know the tail of Scorpio is Maui's fishhook, for example, 
but none of my books have drawings suggesting exactly which stars are 
included.  Similarly, I have references to the Hindu nakshatra containing 
Spica, but I don't know what other stars are in it.  I'm always interested in 
such sources if anyone on the list has some references...

> > Is anyone else interested in these types of features?
>
> Yes, someone has already expressed interest in the "drawing" form of
> constellations on the sky.  Hopefully they will speak up and you two can
> work together.  This form will be a little difficult, because the
> drawings will need to be distorted to match the curve of the sky.  This
> may be computationally expensive for bitmap dawings, so it might be
> easier if they were in some kind of vector format.  Still in that case,
> I don't really know how we would accomplish the distortion.  So, it
> might be wise to start with only one constellation drawing and we can
> use that to try to figure out the distortion.
>
> This would take a pretty big effort to get coded, so let's only proceed
> if everyone is very sure that they will be able to follow through.
>
I had a few thoughts.  First I thought, "what if we could specify any star 
(including those without gnames) in the clines routines?"  Then, we could 
"draw" crude figures and it would be up to the artist to put them on the 
curved sky.  Extending that thought, "what if we allowed 'dark stars' to 
allow more flexibility in creating the pictures?"  And then, "what if we 
could specify splines to connect the dots?"  I don't know how practical these 
ideas are.  It does put a lot of burden on the artist, who would almost need 
a tool set to help them create the data set.  Anyway, as Jason mentioned, 
this would be the messiest task to program of all the ones mentioned above, 
so I'm not going to get into any rush.  There's plenty of research I see 
ahead to create just lists of star names....

-milton